Transcript of Charles Stross video

Science fiction in Scotland

Hi, I'm Charlie Stross, I write as Charles Stross and I write
science fiction. My favourite way of describing this is, I tell
lies for money!

[Question on screen] What inspired you to
become a science fiction writer?

Well, that's a hard one, because some people grow up knowing
they want to become a premiere league footballer. Some people's
ambition is to join the military or to design fashion.

I just sort of somehow internalised a very weird idea that I
wanted to be an author from a young age. Don't ask me how. It might
have been watching my mother when I was about six trying to write a
novel at the kitchen table. But I somehow internalised this
completely bizarre idea that it was a perfectly legitimate thing
for an adult to want to do.

The science fiction bit perhaps comes from my reading habits
from an early age. Another aspect of it, though, is one of the most
formative influences on my youth. This was being woken up at about
five o'clock in the morning — which was pretty unusual when you're
four-and-a-half / five years old — brought downstairs and sat in
front of the black-and-white television set showing this
flickering, very grainy image of a guy in a really big white suit
climbing down a ladder.

It was, of course, the Apollo 11 moon landing. And for the next
six months I was mad keen to grow up to be an astronaut, until
reality began to intrude and, you know, it was: 'No astronaut for
you'.

[Question on screen] Where do you get your
ideas for your novels from?

I believe it's probably impossible to write a literary,
hyper-realist, modern work of fiction without taking into account
cell phones, the internet, hacking, US Air Force drone strikes in
Afghanistan, and any number of things which were the meat and bread
of science fiction in the 1970s.

So as far as inspiration goes, I've been moving over the past
decade paradoxically back towards the mainstream, to studying human
behaviour in a fairly exact mode. But from the point of view of
examining how we respond to changes in the technological eco-system
we inhabit.

Part of this involves keeping current with trends and changes in
technology and the sciences. Part of it is also observing the human
uses of new technologies which are utterly unexpected and very very
strange.

For example, in the late 1980s it became obvious that you could
put a photo detector on a silicon chip and manufacture essentially
the optical sensor of a digital camera, very cheaply.

By the 1990s I was reading outlandish proposals by scientists
that you could, in principle, manufacture these camera chips for
five pence each.

What are you going to do with them? Imbed them in telephones?
Well, funnily enough that's exactly what we got. And your
traditional nuts and bolts-mode science fiction narrative would
have examined the physical hardware of making a phone containing a
camera. Hey, we can take photographs and send them to each
other!

This would have completely missed the bigger picture which is,
what are human beings going to do with these?

We have all sorts of strange alarm stories, witch hunts and
panics. For example, 'happy slapping' — the practice of disaffected
youth running up to and assaulting a random stranger while one of
their friends films the activity and uploads it to YouTube.

Or we have 'sexting' — the habit of American school kids and
teens of sending topless photographs between their phones, which
has resulted in prosecutors in the [United] States running mad and
prosecuting teenagers for child pornography offences facilitated
entirely by that strange five-pence camera on a chip.

What human beings do with technology is far more interesting
than the technologies themselves. It tells us something about the
human condition. Technologies expand the range of possible human
behaviours. I find it kind of fascinating to try and see how this
takes place and what human beings are going to do with them.

[Question on screen] Can you give us your
definition of science fiction?

First you need to define fiction. I would define fiction as lies
we tell in an attempt to explore the human condition. If it's not a
lie then presumably it's real or perceived as real so you could
argue its documentary or a work of non-fiction.

Fiction is constructive, creative lies. Science fiction arguably
is entertaining and insightful lies that explore the human
condition if we make changes to some of the constants around
us.

If we postulate that the speed of light is something we can beat
or that we can build time machines, or that there are aliens out
there, how do people deal with these consequences?

It's actually very very rare indeed to find a work of science
fiction that isn't, at it's heart, about human beings.